1. Field of the Invention
The invention disclosed and claimed herein generally pertains to a method for increasing efficiency in selecting a build ahead configuration (BAC), pertaining to a particular type of product, for use in supplying an ordered product of the particular type. More specifically, the invention pertains to a method for readily determining the amount of effort required to modify or reconfigure each of a number of BAC's, in order to meet the specifications of a newly ordered product. Even more particularly, the invention pertains to a method of the above type wherein the BAC's are ranked or placed in an order, according to the modification effort they respectively require.
2. Description of the Related Art
In industries such as the computer and electronics industries, wherein manufacturers supply complex products, customers typically want the products they order to be highly configurable. That is, for a particular type or category of product, customers want a large number of options to choose from, in regard to product properties, characteristics, features and/or components. As a result, orders for different individual products of the same product type can have specifications that are quite different from one another. This situation is illustrated, for example, by certain types of computer related products. Such products can have numerous options in regard to characteristics and components, such as the amount of memory, the type of storage, the type of monitor and the type of CD-ROM.
It will be readily apparent that complex products as described above generally cannot be built in advance, that is, before customer orders are received therefor. It is too difficult to predict exactly what the specifications for different product orders will require. As a result, an effort to build and store such products in advance would require a very large inventory, in order to cover all reasonable permutations of orderable features, and such inventories tend to be very expensive. At the same time, suppliers can face substantial pressure to reduce the time needed to deliver products of the above types, upon receiving customer orders for them. For example, business requirements could mandate that a product must be built and shipped by the end of the current calendar quarter. Alternatively, an ordered product could be needed by the customer sooner than normal scheduling would allow, due to limitations on manufacturing capacity or for other reasons.
To meet these conflicting needs and requirements, procedures have been developed whereby the producer and supplier will estimate, based on its experience and knowledge, the features, characteristics, and components that will be fairly close to what customers will actually want, when ordering the supplier's products of a particular product type. The supplier then builds or constructs a number of configurations based on the estimates, wherein each configuration is a partially completed or unfinished version of a product of the particular type. These configurations are referred to as build ahead configurations (BAC's). Moreover, different BAC's of the same product type are usefully built to have characteristics or components that are different from one another, in order to cover a range of characteristics and components. Then, when an order for an individual product of the particular product type is received, the supplier will decide which of the available BAC's most closely matches the specifications of the received order. This BAC is then selected, and reconfigured as needed to comply with the order. BAC's are sometimes referred to as common configurations, or as “plain vanilla” versions or machines.
The procedures disclosed above have generally proved to be very beneficial. However, selecting the best BAC to use for a product order, from a group of pre-constructed BAC's of the particular product type, generally requires comparing the respective characteristics of each BAC with the product order specifications. Currently, a significant amount of time consuming effort can be required to perform this task. Accordingly, it would be advantageous to provide an automated mechanism for efficiently determining which of a number of available BAC's could be modified, with the least amount of effort, to match the product order specifications. Also, it would be beneficial to prioritize or rank the available BAC's, according to the respective modification effort required for each one. This would be useful in advising a product manufacturer of the best BAC to select, for use in completing a product order.